WhatsApp tests its own Snapchat Stories clone

If this ever make its way out of testing, another Facebook-owned app will be getting the Snapchat Stories treatment. WhatsApp is testing what it calls Status, a new feature that will let you share photos and videos you can overlay with emojis and text and it stays up for 24 hours. According to BGR India, the feature is currently available to registered public beta testers of the app using rooted Android or iOS devices.

The app on Android gets a new Status tab between the Chats and Calls tabs. It doesn’t take over your ability to share a status message on the service. What it does is create a new channel for users to share visual content with their contacts. At the moment it doesn’t allow users to manually delete Status updates after they’ve been shared. And they can’t be set to have longer or shorter lifespan online. You can specify which contacts can get the updates. This feature seems to be in line with Mark Zuckerberg’s push to prioritize video content as they try to drive video ad revenue. It’s something that WhatsApp can now take advantage of as it changed its privacy policy to basically allow business to show ads to users. Now, we have to see if this makes it out of beta.

Source: TechCrunch

WhatsApp beta gets OneDrive message backup on Windows phones

If you’re looking for a way to securely store your messages and data from the app, WhatsApp released a new update for its beta version on Windows Phone to do just that. The service now lets you safely store data on Microsoft OneDrive. All you need to do to enable the feature is head to Settings > Chat and Security > Backup. From there you can select if you want to backup manually or automatically. With automatic, you can select whether to backup daily, weekly, or monthly. You can also opt to just upload backups while you’re on Wi-Fi and not on cellular data. A stable version of this should hopefully show up in the future.

Source: WinBeta

WhatsApp Android beta version gets Snapchat-like stickers

We’ve reached a point where social media apps have started to employ similar features in hopes of keeping its user base or attracting more people into its platform. The latest example is another Facebook-owned company copying Snapchat. WhatsApp released an update for its Android beta app that introduces stickers and the ability to doodle on messages.

Aside from that the app gets pseudo-flash for taking night-time selfies and emojis will start to appear larger in chats when you don’t include text with it. If you use Facebook Messenger, that messaging app has the same feature (re: the bigger emojis).

Source: The Next Web

WhatsApp to share user data with Facebook

While we would’ve thought WhatsApp was the more privacy conscious alternative to Facebook Messenger, it looks like that has changed. WhatsApp will now be sharing user data with its mother company, Facebook. And yes, this information will be used to sell more ads. While they won’t be seeing your messages as WhatsApp employs end-to-end encryption, what Facebook will be seeing is your metadata, or the data about your messages. So yes, they might be able to see your phone number and from that bit of information find out where you live and target more ads to you.

We already know Facebook collects as much data as it can from us, so it really was bound to happen that WhatsApp, which the social network bought for US$16 billion in 2014. Aside from phone number, though, both companies are pretty vague on what information WhatsApp will be sharing. But if you see the data points Facebook collects, you sort of get an idea what they might get from WhatsApp.

Source: Gizmodo